Sublime

Tennis is the sport in which you talk to yourself. No athletes talk to themselves like tennis players. Pitchers, golfers, goalkeepers, they mutter to themselves, of course, but tennis players talk to themselves—and answer. In the heat of a match, tennis players look like lunatics in a public square, ranting and swearing and conducting Lincoln-Dougl

When you chase perfection, when you make perfection the ultimate goal, do you know what you’re doing? You’re chasing something that doesn’t exist. You’re making everyone around you miserable.

You’re making yourself miserable. Perfection? There’s about five times a year you wake up perfect, when you can’t lose to anybody, but it’s not those five t

I walk off the court a winner, wondering if there’s a lesson in this. Can I tap this sort of relaxation when the stakes are real, when it’s a slam? Should I just go into every match hungover?

I sweat a lot, more than most players, so I need to begin hydrating many hours before a match. I down quarts of a magic elixir invented for me by Gil, my trainer for the last seventeen years. Gil Water is a blend of carbs, electrolytes, salt, vitamins, and a few other ingredients Gil keeps a closely guarded secret.

Roy Emerson has the most slams (twelve), and nobody thinks he’s better than Rod Laver. Nobody. My fellow players, along with any tennis expert or historian I respect, agree that Laver was the best, the king, because he won all four. More, he did it in the same year—twice. Granted, there were only two surfaces back then, grass and clay, but still, t

A short time later my mother tells me that the 60 Minutes report was actually an exposé on this Bollettieri character, who was in essence running a tennis sweatshop that employed child labor.

friend J. R. Moehringer. It was J.R., before we even met, who first made me think seriously about putting my story on paper. During my final U.S. Open, in 2006, I spent all my free time reading J.R.’s staggering memoir, The Tender Bar.

It’s no accident, I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature.